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Comment by Lazare | Hacker News Reader

It's not really news; it's always been clear that:

1. The Bank of England knew about the Libor rigging as it happened

2. And was, at a minimum, very happy with the results (given that it reduced the risk of bank runs imperiling the entire system)

3. And that nobody involved really thought this was a serious issue, much less a crime.

Putting the above together, it would be surprising if there wasn't some pressure from the Bank of England to push Libor down; why wouldn't they be doing that? In the circumstances, it would have practically been remiss of them to do otherwise.

Of course, it looks absolutely horrific now that we've decided that manipulating Libor is a serious issue that people should go to prison for!

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> "3. And that nobody involved really thought this was a serious issue, much less a crime."

I'm not sure where that point came from. It's not only a crime, it's an extremely serious crime. What on Earth are you talking about?

LIBOR is a derivative of daily rate data which is shared between banks. It is not rigged centrally.

You can't tell investors that the rate is based on a daily measurement of interbank risk, and then just go ahead and base that rate on something entirely different when it suits you. That's called fraud.

> I'm not sure where that point came from. It's not only a crime, it's an extremely serious crime. What on Earth are you talking about?

The OP never said it wasn't illegal, just that no one thought it was a serious crime. Kind of like how sodomy is illegal for DoD personnel under UCMJ law, no one gives a damn and no one enforces it.

> You can't tell investors that the rate is based on a daily measurement of interbank risk, and then just go ahead and base that rate on something entirely different when it suits you.

But it's not based on interbank risk, it's based on how much you THINK you can get an interbank loan for. How much you THINK the risk is worth. They base the Libor rate off a lot of thoughts and few facts. The fact that they base it entirely off of thoughts and few facts gives these bank personnel a lot of incentive to lowball, giving whatever number is necessary to get the lowest loan possible and profit the most.

Libor rigging will continue at all levels until they change HOW they get to the Libor rate.

> It's not only a crime, it's an extremely serious crime. What on Earth are you talking about?

Today it is. Back then it wasn't. (Or rather, it wasn't seen as such.) It was, by definition, a number that people made up based on their gut feeling (NOT hard data), and there was no regulation or precedent for what sort of number you could make up.

Notice that in the linked article, the Bank of England carefully doesn't deny putting pressure on banks to keep Libor low, and just says that: ""

Or see the article I linked elsewhere in the thread about Barclay's who was perfectly open with analysts and regulators that they were lying about Libor to improve their share price: http://dealbreaker.com/2012/07/same-old-boring-story/

Yes, we see it as a serious crime now, but it's pretty clear that circa 2007-2008, that was not a common view.

> LIBOR is a derivative of daily rate data which is shared between banks [...] You can't tell investors that the rate is based on a daily measurement of interbank risk

It's neither of those things, and I certainly hope investors weren't being told that, because that would be a lie. It's literally the result of asking some banks, "hey, if you went and borrowed some money...how much do you reckon you'd get charged?". And it turns out that's horribly subjective, not very useful, and prone to manipulation!

That people think LIBOR is some objectively calculated rate is probably an even bigger lie than LIBOR itself. How did that view come about, poor financial reporting?

The calculations are objective, the input values are subjective.

ICE says they ask a particular bunch of people "If _your_ bank wants to borrow money, how much does that cost?" and then they do a particular calculation to turn all those inputs into LIBOR

90 days later we can see all the individual numbers, so we can check if ICE did their job properly, and also we can see if, say, Lloyds have been ridiculously low-balling their numbers every Tuesday.

Because the question is subjective, that's still subject to bias, in particular it makes an unspecified assumption: that the bank asked could in fact secure such a loan because it's available to them if they wanted it. As a result loss of liquidity in parts of the market is not visible through LIBOR even with reforms.

There seems to be a pattern lately of people replying to comments assuming the poster doesn't know anything. It is getting really annoying. Pro tip: many of us here work in finance or related fields. It is like people are just itching to show how much they know.

> 3. And that nobody involved really thought this was a serious issue, much less a crime.

TFA: "Mr Johnson objects, saying that this would mean breaking the rules for setting Libor, which required him to put in rates based only on the cost of borrowing cash. "

so it seems like the people involved were well aware of what they were doing.

Also, it's been news to me that the Bank of England was actively pushing for the LIBOR rates to go down, and was not merely "happy" with them going down, and I've pretty much followed this scandal since it first came out.

Breaking rules != serious issues

People speed all the time, no one thinks twice about it. They know they're speeding, they know they're breaking the rules, but the culture they're in doesn't care. I don't know enough about LIBOR rates in banking culture, but it seems possible this is a similar situation.

> Breaking rules != serious issues

In a nutshell, this is why we're seeing all these financial scandals and stockmarket melt-downs every so many years. Because the perception has become that if you break the rules it is not a serious issue, no matter what level of society you are operating at.

If you start equating speeding with breaking banking rules something is fundamentally wrong (not that speeding is ok, but the impact of say going 10 km over the limit versus wrecking the economy seems to be of a qualitatively different level).

Not all rules & rule violations are created equal — embezzling money is different than deleting an innocuous email. Also, 'rules' don't mean 'legal requirement' necessarily.

Deleting an innocuous email became a rule violation because of all the times a substantive email was deleted under the cover of allegedly being innocuous.

Well in banking, it's very important that there's trust in the system. Senior staff in UK financial institutions risk being barred from the industry if they're found to have broken rules and there's a reason that kind of penalty is in play.

Libor rates are quite serious as the outcome of trades depends on them. Each trade has a "winner" and a "loser" so if one side can choose the outcome they're essentially cheating the other side out of money.

The equivalent would be going to a casino where they can arbitrarily change the odds of winning to suit them, during the game.

Too good an argument since it also justifies the subprime mortgage scandal, and more.

> Mr Johnson objects, saying that this would mean breaking the rules for setting Libor, which required him to put in rates based only on the cost of borrowing cash.

There's a huge difference between "hey, this form is asking for my home phone number, I can't put cell phone number in!", and "I'm going to go to prison for years for this!". If Johnson had a clue that the behaviour being discussed would lead to prison time (and it has) he'd have made a very different objection.

> Also, it's been news to me that the Bank of England was actively pushing for the LIBOR rates to go down

Well, it hadn't been proven, but it's been talked about for years. Eg, this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...

Of course, whether you trust Barclay's about this is another question. :)

You have to be the world's biggest idiot to believe anything a huge corporation like that says. They have entire propaganda units to make them look as good as possible.

If it was a good idea for everyone, why not do it explicitly and transparently?

Allowing (or even encouraging) a small group of people to secretly make a lot of money doesn't seem like a fair way to run the economy.

I don't believe the idea was to make money at that time. It was to avoid a run on the banks and a repeat of 1929. I am not convinced the economy would have been better off. In those days you had pretty much one major bank failing every week.

So why not make the change explicitly? I'm not against a change in the rate of LIBOR, nor am I against people making profits, as long as it's done fairly.

Again, not profits, collapse of the financial system.

The problem was: how do you combat fear? The LIBOR submissions were pretty transparent and investors were using it as a way to guess which banks would be the next to fail. I guess the BoE either thought they needed a short term solution / didn't have the time or appetite to change the way LIBOR was submitted. Or they thought that if they were hidding individual bank submissions (which they ultimately did), it would only aggravate fear.

No this is warped. They put profits before stability, then needed low rates forever, then had to lie again.

The LIBOR rates were constructed by the BBA phoning around the banks, and reporting an average of the numbers they came up with. How would the BoE "explicitly" change that? By telling the BBA to lie? I don't imagine you'd find that "fair".

Yeah but they could have requested the BBA not to publish individual contributions. I guess they thought it wouldn't have been enough.

The BoE rigging might not have been to make money, but the rigging done by individual traders at the participating banks definitely was.

Yeah but this was an unrelated event, which happened before the financial crisis, and (as far as we know) didn't involve the senior management of either the banks or the BoE.

Given the level of compliance & audit work required in the UK FS industry (look for example at the sizes of regulatory and operational risk teams) and the nature of career paths in the industry (senior figures tend to come up from the ranks quite often), I'd have to say I'd be really surprised if no-one in the senior management of affected banks was aware that Libor manipulation occurred.

That's not to say that there'll ever be enough evidence to prosecute that awareness, but the idea that they have no idea what goes on at lower levels, and that none of the 2nd/3rd line risk functions or Internal Audit did any work that would have uncovered that activity....

No the development of the swap market is quite recent. At the time when senior managemers were traders or sales people, there was no particular incentive for anyone to push libor submissions one way or another (and libor submission was more of a boring routine, the markets only started focusing on them from 2007).

So your suggestion is that no-one in any of the risk functions or internal audit functions (or the external auditors of the bank) ever thought to look at Libor in the years from it becoming important until the scandal emerged?

And that senior management, who were surely aware that it was now important, never thought about the risk of a rating based on trust being manipulated by people who would profit from that manipulation by receiving increased bonuses?

If all that's true, doesn't say a lot for all these very highly paid bank executives does it?

I do not believe Libor was audited or under the supervision of any of the risk and internal audit functions before 2007. And you are right, the controls were insufficient, and have been considerably strengthened since. But this wasn't deemed to be a sensitive activity. And outside of a few swap traders who were sitting on massive libor future positions, the little rounding up or down that the money market desks were doing before the crisis wouldn't really matter to anyone else.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal , looks like it was pretty relevant from 2000 onwards at least. The excerpt below seems to strongly indicate manipulation designed to improve banks profits over a long period of time

"Statistical analysis indicated that the Libor rose consistently on the first day of each month between 2000 and 2009 on the day that most adjustable-rate mortgages had as a change date on which new repayment rates would "reset". An email referenced in the lawsuit from the Barclay's settlement, showed a trader asking for a higher Libor rate because "We're getting killed on our three-month resets." During the analysed period, the Libor rate rose on average more than two basis points above the average on the first day of the month, and between 2007 and 2009, the Libor rate rose on average more than seven and one-half basis points above the average on the first day of the month."

Also from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-01-28/libor-lie...

"At Barclays, derivatives traders made 257 requests for U.S.-dollar Libor, yen Libor and euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor, submissions from January 2005 to June 2009, "

So whilst it may be true that it became more relevant after 2007, it seems be that there were some elements of this that were longer standing.

Libor rigging covers two quite different things, which happened at different times for different reasons.

> If it was a good idea for everyone, why not do it explicitly and transparently?

The point was that the entire banking system was seizing up, and for the banks in the biggest trouble, being honest about how much it was costing to borrow money (or worse, the fact that there was no money to be borrowed) would have sent them over the edge and (maybe!) taken the system with them. If your trying to fake it 'til you make it, you can't do that explicitly and transparently.

(The US equivalent was to just force all banks to take government money whether they wanted or needed it or not, because just bailing out the ones who needed it would have made it clear who was in trouble, and again, sent them over the edge. That was, again, done in order to avoid transparency, and neither policy was without moral questions, but both worked in the end. And the UK one was at least cheap.)

> Allowing (or even encouraging) a small group of people to secretly make a lot of money doesn't seem like a fair way to run the economy.

Libor manipulation may be wrong, but it didn't really make anyone a lot of money. And this particular part of the overall scandal certainly didn't. Manipulating rates so that you can borrow money cheaply might be profitable; lying and claiming you can borrow money cheaply when yu actually can't is not to avoid sparking a bank run is not. :)

Fake it till you make it? You mean cover up gross incompetence/fraud that could have seen them in jail. The UK lost control of the law in finance. A lot of the USA stuff was washed through London because of this.

How they got into the bank run situation was illegal. You have one warped perspective.

> The point was that the entire banking system was seizing up, and for the banks in the biggest trouble, being honest about how much it was costing to borrow money (or worse, the fact that there was no money to be borrowed) would have sent them over the edge and (maybe!) taken the system with them.

Anything that can be destroyed by the truth deserves to be destroyed.

Carl Sagan had a great quote about things like this:

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken."

As an update, keep in mind that Barclay's was being pretty open about it. They were talking about it to the NY Fed, US Fed, ECB, World Bank, etc.

http://dealbreaker.com/2012/07/same-old-boring-story/

Like, literally, a Barclay's guy is on record telling a regulator that they were lying about Libor because telling the truth hurt their share price, so they stopped! And then everyone laughed, and that was the end of it, because it was just Libor, and it's not like there was an assumption that it was somehow accurate or objective.

Times change.

Times change! Same Barclays that bailed itself out by lending to Qatar so they could buy back Barclays shares, which UK regulators signed off so one UK bank could appear solvent. Sant, who signed it off, got a job at Barclays shortly after.

Who are you? Why pages of jocular "boys will be boys" on UK fraud?

You don't think that people on the other ends of trades that depended on Barclay's Libor rate were depending on it being objective or accurate?

So those people on the other end of the trades, literally were aware that Barclays were ripping them off by manipulating the rate and were fine with that??

If so, where can I find these traders who like losing money, so I can make some trades with them.

> You don't think that people on the other ends of trades that depended on Barclay's Libor rate were depending on it being objective or accurate?

I certainly hope that people were not depending on Libor being an objective metric, because that would imply they hadn't the foggiest clue what Libor is or how it's calculated.

(Also, "Barclays was ripping them off" implies Barclay's was on the other end of the trade, but that's not typically what happened. A more representative example might be "hedge fund buys a bunch of mortgage backed securities pegged to Libor + some number; Barclay's lies to try and avoid going under and pushes the Libor rate down a fraction of a hair, meaning a few million homeowners pay slightly less interest than they "should", and the hedge fund makes slightly less money that it "should". Which is, sure, horrible, and people have paid large fines and gone to jail for it. But it's hard to get too outraged over it; compare it to, eg, the banks who knowingly resold bad mortgages.)

well the lawsuits that Barclays and others are facing seem to indicate there was rather more harm than that. One example, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal

"Early estimates are that the rate manipulation scandal cost US states, counties, and local governments at least $6 billion in fraudulent interest payments, above $4 billion that state and local governments have already had to spend to unwind their positions exposed to rate manipulation."

"The Bank of England knew about the Libor rigging as it happened"

Isn't the implication that BoE actually encouraged it in the first place, as opposed to just simply having knowledge of? The distinction is important.

Yes, because the UK was about to collapse due to rampant fraud, which the boe also allowed.

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